Description

CROWD:
1. First off how do we want to handle the demotion or elevation of permissions,groups rather. Say an admin goes to just an editor or an editor goes to admin, currently there will be no change on Roller.
2. If user has permissions for the application but is not part of a group, currently it gives editor roles; does that work? If not we need to make a that change.
3. Old users can continue to use thier Roller accounts, if the user is a user of the Roller application in Crowd they will authenticate through Crowd. This is as long as the two accounts have the same
user name. Once authenticated through Crowd, Roller Authentication will not work. So if Crowd goes down and all users are in Crowd then no one will be able to enter the site. Recommendation is to have
at least one admin user that doesn't have an account in Crowd, this way there will always be a way in.
4. If the crowd.properties file is not on the classpath then we never use crowd to authenticate, however if you have users that were authenticated through crowd then they will not be able to login.
5. If the user exists in Crowd and has permissions to access Roller and Roller doesn't contain this user account then a new user will be registered automatically; if no groups are setup then the user
will have editor role, if the user is part of a group that contains the string "admin" or "ADMIN" then that user will be given Admin rights.
6. Here is an example crowd.properties file, currently we get the file every time there is a need for it; so that resource will be continually accessed. If this is problem, which I can understand I can
create a singleton that will hanlde the crowd.properties file and only load it once. This means if any changes are made to the file we have to restart the application.

You can add this file the same way you add the roller-custom.properties. TimeZone and Locale are not required, but standard format.
7. These are the settings that need to be set in the roller-custom.properties to enable the use of Crowd Authentication:

Crowd Auth, need these settings to be enabled
users.sso.enabled=true
users.sso.autoProvision.enabled=true

If these are not set Crowd authentication will not work correctly. The AutoProvision is what makes this all work, the users from Crowd and not in Roller will be saved to Rollers db the first time the log in. The reason this is needed
is so that permissions can be written for Roller. Will still need to add some code to ensure when users get promoted or demoted, those changes make it to the Roller DB.

Please see attached files as they contain these changes and are in sync with Trunk, as of today. We can extend this functionality but here is working starting point.

Dave Johnson (Inactive)
added a comment - 08/Feb/12 18:36 Nick, thanks so much for this work. I plan to take a look at it this week and if it doesn't break things I will add it in.
It appears that you already have an ICLA on file with Apache as a Nicolas Padilla is listed here http://people.apache.org/committer-index.html , can you confirm that's you on the list?

Dave Johnson (Inactive)
added a comment - 11/Feb/12 15:37 This looks pretty good, code-wise, but I would like to see a couple of changes before I introduce it into the Roller code-base:
1) There are a couple of e.printStackTrace() statements that should be replaced with log.debug() or log.error() depending on what is appropriate.
2) Instead of introducing a new properties file, the Crowd properties should be added into roller.properties and the normal Roller properties classes should be used to access them.

Sorry, been really busy and haven't had a chance to look at this until today. Yes, that is me in the Unlisted section, always wanted to contribute to the open source community. I will get these changes done and get you some diff files. I would like to take a look at the new changes, but have been super busy the last few months. Once these changes are in and I can have some ammo for upgrading and giving the new changes a try.

Nick Padilla
added a comment - 11/Feb/12 16:17 Hey Dave!
Sorry, been really busy and haven't had a chance to look at this until today. Yes, that is me in the Unlisted section, always wanted to contribute to the open source community. I will get these changes done and get you some diff files. I would like to take a look at the new changes, but have been super busy the last few months. Once these changes are in and I can have some ammo for upgrading and giving the new changes a try.
Thanks for your time!

Here are the changed files, did a bit of code clean up and initialized the crowdClient in the class constructor - we will now use a cached object instead to save that bit of overhead from creating it every time. Not sure why I didn't do that in the first place. This version should perform better due to this optimization. It is a much cleaner class now. Also, I upgraded the Crowd Client to the latest build. Ran the build and everything passed, of course. I did need to add slf4j because of the upgraded crowd client.

I did run these changes through a test in eclipse and standalone tomcat. All is well!

Nick Padilla
added a comment - 12/Feb/12 00:05 Here are the changed files, did a bit of code clean up and initialized the crowdClient in the class constructor - we will now use a cached object instead to save that bit of overhead from creating it every time. Not sure why I didn't do that in the first place. This version should perform better due to this optimization. It is a much cleaner class now. Also, I upgraded the Crowd Client to the latest build. Ran the build and everything passed, of course. I did need to add slf4j because of the upgraded crowd client.
I did run these changes through a test in eclipse and standalone tomcat. All is well!

Hi Nick, thanks for your contribution, however, out of fear of the library falling out-of-date (it's at 2.4 while 2.7 is soon shipping), need to bring in an additional non-Central repository to Roller to obtain the Crowd JARs, and the non-open source nature of the JARs (proprietary code, no source code available), we've decided to pull this functionality outside of Roller. Email here: http://markmail.org/message/tyxrhzclkycovd4p.

If you wish to put these two classes in GitHub, or make a blog entry of them, and explain how to hack Roller so that those wanting this functionality (and having the proper Crowd license) can incorporate it into Roller, that would be great, and we can link to it from the Roller Wiki. (I just added in a previous comment the code changes needed in case you don't have the time.) Also, we're open to patches that facilitate such plugins generically so long as we don't need to include non-open source JARs within the distribution or need to add non-Central repos to the Roller pom.

Glen Mazza
added a comment - 06/Aug/13 18:01 Hi Nick, thanks for your contribution, however, out of fear of the library falling out-of-date (it's at 2.4 while 2.7 is soon shipping), need to bring in an additional non-Central repository to Roller to obtain the Crowd JARs, and the non-open source nature of the JARs (proprietary code, no source code available), we've decided to pull this functionality outside of Roller. Email here: http://markmail.org/message/tyxrhzclkycovd4p .
If you wish to put these two classes in GitHub, or make a blog entry of them, and explain how to hack Roller so that those wanting this functionality (and having the proper Crowd license) can incorporate it into Roller, that would be great, and we can link to it from the Roller Wiki. (I just added in a previous comment the code changes needed in case you don't have the time.) Also, we're open to patches that facilitate such plugins generically so long as we don't need to include non-open source JARs within the distribution or need to add non-Central repos to the Roller pom.